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What is it about harmonies in music that just sounds so good? Can science (and our amazing musical guest David Bennet) help us get to the bottom of it?

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:06:24) Why do we like Harmony?
(00:56:10) Our Music Theory Questions
(01:24:04) Outro

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We also learn about: 

Listening to Carly Rae Jepsen academically, the musical expert said Caroline has good music taste, I’m down hereeeeee, harmony is just the interaction of any two notes, Tom thinks about high school choir harmony all the time, even babies like harmony, even the oldest flutes have the same holes in them, octaves are so similar we call them the same note, watchmojo ranking of intervals, Carly Rae Jepsen - It Has Many Notes!, a spicy dissonant interval can be good in moderation - like a spicy seasoning in food, Tom is just grinning getting to ask these music questions, we invited you as a guest and you bring this dissonance to our home?? the messy sounding tones match to messy looking ratios, why can we even distinguish pitch? we use pitch in communication so much, animal sounds are the only things that make pitch, animals can recognize intervals, we call bird song song - but to them it’s probably more like language, it sounds cheesy - but in every human voice there’s a harmony, we’re asking the question backwards - we needed to understand harmony to be able to decipher a pitch, hearing the difference between notes IN YOUR HEAD, what we hear in our head is different than the world around us, harmonies are audio cheesecake - something we evolved to enjoy pumped to the max, “we can make cheesecake with our mouths”, cheesecake is just molecules, did you not have to learn human evolution in music school? oh my guilty pleasures are Tchaikovsky’s later works, Ella humble bragging about her spotify wrapped, this is going to come off as hostile but hasn’t enough already been said about the Beatles, how different generations experience the Beatles, more like DavidLegoStopMotion, it took 5 years after a dissertation on how to have a career as a musician on youtube, try song ideas and listen to them later, music theory is Descriptive not Prescriptive, liking technical music, the only way you’ll practice is if you enjoy it, the dopamine hit from the cheesecake of practice, can you send that advice to my mom 10 years ago, but you did practice… yeah, teenagers are good at learning instruments because they have free time, start learning music with the music that you love, learning sheet music at the same time as playing is like learning to write as you’re learning to speak, you learn to write after you’ve practiced speaking for years, you’re full of good ideas David who knew.

Can trees talk to each other? And how does that personifying metaphor square with the actual science behind it? And what can we learn from the stories of art on trading cards throughout history?

Images we Talk About:  
Trade Cards
3 Modern Trading Cards
Yuka Morii's Cards
Terror
Hyalopterus Lemure
Preposterous Proportions

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:02:08) Tree Talk
(00:52:16) Trading Card Art
(01:33:47) Outro

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The answer is yes maybe sometimes and no, talking tree folklore, communication as transferring information, The Secret Life of Trees, Caroline WAS vegan, plants feel pain - GOOD, tree self defense, secondary metabollites, you got me AND Ella to write that down, tannin defense mechanism, volatile organic compounds, giraffes avoiding nearby leaves after eating, maybe trees are eavesdropping, mycorrhizal networks, could it be diffusion or a baby tree suckling on its mother, do a stanford prisoner experiment for trees, that tree is giving mother, mother trees - altruistic fungi - and the perils of plant personification, literally talking to trees, your first priority shouldn’t be to not be boring - maybe second, respect for the organisms that are fundamentally unlike us - their unfathomable lives, the modern boom of trading cards, trade cards, mass produced color images were cool and novel, how many credits for that chromo?  absurd advertising from the 1800s, anthropomorphic fruits and veggies were all the rage, trade cards were a microcosm of marketing-invention-and collecting, Ella’s baseball impression, looking at a mainstream sport through the nerdiest lens imaginable, cigarette baseball cards, Doug McWilliams photographed 8% of all major league baseball players, oh right photography is an art, and so is building relationships with players, cards began to stand on their own, Richard Garfield wanted baseball cards for nerds, Magic and Pokemon credit their artists - but YuGiOh does not, Yuka Morii’s sculpture cards, Adam Rex’s Terror, Richard Thomas’ Hyalopterous Lemure, Julie Baroh flipping off her classmates, companies screwing over artists, it’s still art in spite of being a piece of cardboard.

Sources:
2010 Paper: Explaining evolution of plant communication by airborne signals
New York Times: The Social Life of Forests
Book: The Secret Life Of Plants
National Geographic: Plants can talk. Yes, really. Here’s how.
2025 Pape: Shrub anti-herbivore defenses exhibit non-linear and varied responses to increased herbivore density
1990 Paper: Acacia Tree Kills Antelope
Book: Ethylene in Plant Biology
BBC News: Plants send SOS signal to insects
TED ED: Can Plants Talk to Each Other?
2015 Paper: Inter-plant communication through mycorrhizal networks mediates complex adaptive behaviour in plant communities
1997 Paper: Net transfer of carbon between ectomycorrhizal tree species in the field
2008 Paper: Hydraulic redistribution of water from Pinus ponderosa trees to seedlings: evidence for an ectomycorrhizal pathway
Scientific America: Do Trees Really Support Each Other through a Network of Fungi?
2023 Paper: Positive citation bias and overinterpreted results lead to misinformation on common mycorrhizal networks in forests
2024 Paper: Mother trees, Altruistic Fungi, and the Perils of Plant Personification
Facts or Fairy Tales? Peter Wohlleben and the Hidden Life of Trees
Video: Project gives 200-year-old Dublin tree ‘a voice’
[Scientific America: The Idea That Trees Talk to Cooperate Is Misleading](The Idea That Trees Talk to Cooperate Is Misleading | Scientific American)
Article: The World’s First Talking Tree Helps Young People Reconnect with Nature
Smithsonian: Do Trees Talk to Each Other?
---
Cornell University on History of Trade Cards
History of Chromolithography
American Antiquarian Society on Trade Cards
PBS on Trade Cards
Baseball Card Photography History
Doug McWilliams via Baseball Hall of Fame
Doug McWilliams Interview with SABR
Doug McWilliams NYTimes Interview
Richard Garfield on Magic's Creation
Yuka Morii's Pokemon Card Art
Magic Artist Julie Baroh's Interview
Magic Artist Donato Giancola's Points Against Artist Policies
Magic Artist Melissa Benson's Artist Advice

What is the most boring element, and just how boring could it possibly be? Turns out: VERY! And how can we decipher what Shakespeare sounded like, and who among us can lay claim to his accent?

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:03:52) The Most Boring Element
(00:48:53) Solving Shakespeare's Accent
(01:26:37) Outro

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We’re not going for the easy sappy answer, what makes something boring? all the oxygen stans updating wikipedia, the most boring is obviously bohrium, thulium is used in lasers and x-rays, about 24 grams of astatine per planet, shout out Sir Martin Poliakoff, the 4 elements that came from pitchblende, Caroline stop anthropomorphizing protactinium, the isotope brevium, you could have been called abracadabra and instead your legal name is Actinium’s dad, wow what a fascinating [Rn]5f 26d7s2 ground state electron configuration! give me more random letters and numbers Tom! protactinium is there if your smoke detector is old, the global ocean conveyor belt, THC (Thermal Haline Circulation), that’s the ocean bit- anyway here’s something completely different about protactinium, paleoclimatology sounds a lot like protactinium, Ella realizes the turn, HE DID IT, whoa Caroline doing thumbs up to climate change, they’re de-extincting William Shakespeare, where better to waste my time pursuing this than Let’s Learn Everything, shakespeare is typically performed in received pronunciation, wait this is secretly a UK vs US topic! I’m surprised it took you 3 years to figure out we just keep you for your American accent, Americans have vestigial roticity, the universal beauty of two dudes yapping, what a strange elitism to claim to have Elizabethan English, Appalachian claims of shakespearean accents as a way to boost image, if you want to know what people sounded like back then… look at what people wrote about it! more one to one spellings like “philome” for film, we can deduce the accent from rhymes and puns, I loov this topic, Tom’s accent gets miscalibrated, an open midback is really stylish these days, open mid back unrounded vowel, Ella can move your tongue with her mind, I see why this gameshow didn’t make it to television, don’t wast a reem on a droom, the Rorscach test of the Original Pronunciation created by David and Ben Crystal, flecks of every dialect, “it’s a sound that reminds people of the accent of their home, and so they ten to listen more with their heart than their head”, “American English simply isn’t good enough for Shakespeare”, the Sundry Boroughs of New York baby! the language of Shakespeare is dead but alive in English everywhere, Shakespeare was meant to be played for the public - so it should be spoken like the public, Shakespeare's accent belongs to all of us!

Sources:
Amazing paper from Nature Chemistry: "The Most Boring Chemical Element"
HPS on Protactinium
Los Alamos Laboratory on Protactinium
Periodic Videos on Protactinium
Mining Website on Protactinium's History
Britannica on Pitchblende
Nature Chemistry: "Peculiar Protactinium"
NOAA on the Global Ocean Conveyor Belt
NOAA on Plankton
EOS on Protactinium for Paleoclimatology
Protactinium/Thorium in Paleoclimatology Textbook
Carbonbrief's Climate Tipping Points
Thorium Protactinium Dating
Yu, Francois, and Bacon's first paper on Protactinium Ocean Current Dating
---
Wiki: British colonisation of the Americas
Wiki: Early Modern English
History of English: Early Modern English
BBC: How Americans preserved British English
The Historical Linguist Blog: American English – The language of Shakespeare?
Dialect Blog: Shakespearean vs. Modern English
National Geographic: Tangier Island
BBC: The Tiny Island with a British accent
Language Myths Book
David Crystal’s Original Pronunciation evidence
Paper: Early Modern English Phonology
Oxford Dictionary: Early modern English: grammar, pronunciation, and spelling
University of Toronto: Early Modern English Phonology
NPR: How Did the Bard Really Sound
Youtube: Shakespeare: Original pronunciation

What laws are there to worry about in the moon? And what does space law teach us about Earth law? And what can we learn about societies throughout history from the lens of stuffing dead animals?

Images we Talk About:
Orbiting Space Debris
Fallen Space Debris
Hanging Christian Crocodile
Hanging Christian Crocodile

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:03:02) International Space Law
(01:03:25) Taxidermy
(01:46:48) Outro

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We also learn about: The splash zone of intro to astronomy, space NCIS, the bedrock of 1967 outer space treaty, the first earthling in space (2 tortoises), countries are responsible for their damage and no WMDs, that big tangible moon in the sky, unprecedented lunar traffic this year, potential water ice on the moon could be the next big space race, there’s no moon water regulation, no nation can own the moon, buuuut can an individual - former ventriloquest and used car salesman own the moon?? god don’t call it “untapped resources on the moon”, you can’t own the moon but can you own its resources, there’s a legal officer for the UN officer of outer space affairs! we can allll frack the moon (except no one signed the treaty anyway), we can’t even agree to share moon resources One Day, only “safe and sustainable” space mining allowed, it doesn’t have to be legally binding to make countries want to follow it, a radio telescope on the far side of the moon would be SICK, sorry about all the space junk us 3 put up there, 90 metric tons of re-entry, suing nasa over space debris, if it launched from florida and hit florida it’s actually local state space law, satellite light pollution, satellites don’t die they just crash into a farm upstate, starlink burnt 120 satellites in 1 month alone, there’s no laws about safely deorbiting - no one has to do this, how we treat space is a microcosm of how we treat earth, space law is real, why can’t we bring our optimism from space back to earth instead of the other way around? Ella’s mouse doing drugs, the art of skin arranging, apologies to our ancient Egyptian listeners, the various techniques of Egyptian preservation, arresting from decay, Frederik Ruysch’s wet specimens, crocodiles make a lot of sense for the first taxidermy cause they’re big and leathery - anyway it was hanging in a church…, Tom loses his mind about A SECOND TAXIDERMIED CROCODILE IN A CHURCH, a croc that’s at least from 1623, The Great Italian Taxidermy Crocodile Road Trip, about one third of the british population went to the 1851 great exhibition, the telescope and taxidermy exhibition sounds like a trap for Caroline and Ella, “whimsy and anthropomorphism in taxidermy of the Victorian era”, anthropomorphic taxidermy was considered grotesque, taxidermy didn’t die we just stuffed it back up, environment taxidermy requires knowing an animal inside and out (pun intended), the degrees of ethical taxidermy, ethical is not a binary, it depends on your personal code of ethics, taxidermy as a lens of moral feelings through history.

Sources:
UNOOSA: Outer Space Treaty
UN: International Space Law Explained
Royal Museums Greenwich: Who Owns the Moon?
Lunar Embassy: Buy Some Moon
Politico: Who Owns the Moon
Guardian: Moon Resources
Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Moon Resources
NASA Moon Mining Contracts
Business Insider: Mining Disrupting Science on the Moon
NASA Artemis Accords
ESA Space Environment Statistics
SpaceWatch: Satellites
Natural History Museum: Space Junk
Guardian: Florida Family Sues NASA
Scientific American: Samantha Lawler, Space X Debirs
Journal of Space Safety Engineering: Uncontrolled Re-entry
UNOSSA: United Nations 2007 Space Debris Mitigation Guidelines
ESA Space Environment Report 2024
Rolling Stone: Space Trash
FCC: Deorbiting Satellites Rule
Scientific American: Space Junk Polluting Stratosphere
---
Britannica: Taxidermy
2019 Paper: Animal Bodies between Wonder and Natural History
BBC: Ancient Egyptian mummification 'recipe' revealed
Book: Practical Taxidermy
2020 Paper: The Animal Body As Medium: Taxidermy And European Expansion, 1775–1865
Museum of Idaho: A brief, Gross History of Taxidermy
Atlas Obscura: Crocodile at the Santuario Madonna delle Lacrime Immacolate
University of Dayton: Crocodile Hunting in the Marian Library
Wandering Italy: Grazie, Italy and the Crocodile Church
2006 Paper: The History of Taxidermy: Clues for Preservation
Journal of Antiques and Collectables: Taxidermy: Exploring one of the Most Complicated Collectibles
The Royal Parks: The Great Exhibition of 1851
2012 Thesis: The Shock Proved Fatal: Whimsy and Anthropomorphism in Taxidermy of the Victorian Era, 1851-1899
Cardiff University: Frequently Asked Questions in Taxidermy
Smithsonian: Why Taxidermy Is Being Revived for the 21st Century
Horniman Museum: Ethical Taxidermy
Guardian: Inside the Female-Led World of Ethical Taxidermy
Sussex Wildlife Trust: Putting the Ethical in Taxidermy

Welcome to the (preview for the) Lab Rat Games! The GAME show where we compete to learn anything and everything interesting! We love putting games into our topics, so what happens when we make a whole show of them, with each of us hosting their own section! Plus! We're joined by friend of the show and competitive chaos combatant, Sabrina Cruz!

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How can scientist's unravel the mystery of what dinosaurs ate? Well the clues are right in front of our eyes, or should I say their teeth! And poop! And listener you may already know what a podcast is, but how did proto-podcasts in a chicken coop give us the DNA for what we love, and how did podcasts even happen?

Images we Talk About:
First Iguanadon Tooth
Puffer Fish Teeth
Fish Teeths
Incisivosaurus
Saurolophus
Dinosaur Stomach Contents Fossil
Ham Comic
Sybil's Baby's Radio Rebut

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro

(00:04:33) Dinosaur Diet Detectives

(01:00:51) Support our Show!

(01:04:27) Proto-Podcasts

(02:02:49) Bonus Content!

(02:07:24) Outro

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We also learn about: Deep Dive Discovering Dino Diets, dinosaur time, imagining us discovering a new animal, well we know it doesn’t eat nerds, Ella describes teeth perfectly - “is that what you meant to say Tom?”, the mouth is the first stomach, we found the teeth of the first herbivorous dinosaur before the body - and before we had the word for dinosaur, cinderella/goldilocks teeth, dental microwear, food print, the topography of a grasshopper’s mandible, teeth can be more indicative than stomach content, maybe you just tried in and out for the first time when you got captured by aliens, dinosaur teeth are the old coins of ancient civilizations, egg eating oviraptors, it’s not just us but experts that are confused about oviraptaurs teeth, reconstructing the crime scene of a bit mark, this case has been closed for 70 million years! the tarbosaurus seems to have separated the chicken leg to make eating easier, a tyrannosaur leaving a tooth in the scene of the crime, they not only got bit but lived to tell the tale, this proves tyranosaurs hunted living animals - and weren’t just scavengers, hard foods stay in the stomach longer, some dinosaurs used Gastrolith rocks as stomach teeth, rocks natures teeth, Bromalite can be regurgitalite or coprolite, 580 million year old worm poop, we didn’t think grass was that old then we found it in dinosaur poop,  we put dinosaur poop in a particle accelerator, we’re not looking at poop - we’re constructing the foodchain of dinosaurs, an ancient egyptian podcast, podcasting is NOT an oral tradition, the chicken coop boys, Sybil’s Little Ham Radio Show 20 years before a woman on proper radio, the Titanic sinking sped along radio restrictions, Tom skipped over the cassette before because its science impact was small but its misc impact was huge, explaining cassette tapes at a high frequency so it doesn’t hurt old people to hear, Lou Otten, the syrian cassette archive, mixtapes, Caroline’s family mix CDs, Tom’s custom Jack’s Mannequin Mix CDs, Pacific Horticulture Magazine being delighted that someone’s interested, Tom’s Magic Corner, I knew it was some journalist doing their thing, apple didn’t come up with podcasting - not even the name, journey back to 1999, the dream of RSS, what’s that facebook shaped cloud on the horizon? the dream of hosting your own feed, somehow podcast RSS survived, podcasts are the Horshoecrab of the internet, “wherever you get podcasts” is amazing, The Lab Rat Games!

Sources:

NHM London: Iguanodon Teeth
NHM London: Beyond Jurassic World- What We Really Know About Dinosaurs and How
NHM London: The Seven Greatest Dinosaur Discoveries of the Last 200 Years
British Ecological Society: What do Grasshoppers Eat?
Phys.Org: Cutting Edge Teeth Study
NPR: Dental Detectives: What Fossil Teeth Reveal About Ancestral Human Diets
University of Tokyo: Dinosaur Teeth Reveal What They Didn’t Eat
BBC: Dinosaur Teeth Reveal Feeding Habits
Incisivosaurus
2022 Paper: Incisivosaura Bite Force
University of Pennsilvania: What Fossils Tell Us About the Dining Habits of Dinosaurs
NHM London: Dinosaur Eating Habit Insights from Stegosaurus stenops
2010 Paper: New information on scavenging and selective feeding behaviour of tyrannosaurids
Dave Hone's Archosaur Musings
2012 Paper: Physical evidence of predatory behavior in Tyrannosaurus rex
Save Our Seas: What Tools do Biologists use to Tell What is on the Menu for Wild Animals?
Scientific America: Tyrannosaur’s Stomach Contents Have Been Found for the First Time
2023 Paper: Exceptionally preserved stomach contents of a young tyrannosaurid reveal an ontogenetic dietary shift in an iconic extinct predator
SN Explores: Fossil Stomach Reveals a Dinosaur’s Last Meal
NHM London: Coprolite
The Bristol Dinosaur Project: The Grass Divide
NPR: Over 500 Fossilized Poops Show How Dinosaurs Came to Rule the Earth
American Museum of Natural History: How Does Studying Dinosaurs Benefit Humanity?
---
MET on Memory Boards and Luba Oral Traditions
OED Broadcast Etymology
The Chicken Coop Ham Radio
Sybil's Little Hame Radio Program
NYTimes on Titanic's Impact on Radio Law
Library of Congress on Recorded Radio
NPR On Lout Otten and the Cassette Tape
Wired on Cassette History
NPR on the Syrian Cassette Archive
Berkeley Audio Tape Retrospective
Carl Malamud on Asynchronous Internet Radio
The Earliest Mention of Podcasts in the Guardian
Two-Bit History on the History of RSS
Kevin Werbach's Vision of the Future of RSS and the Internet
TechCrunch: Rest in Peace RSS

It’s not MaxFunDrive without a wild kickoff spectacular! Former real-life VJ and host of MTV's Spring Break 1999, Dave Holmes, takes your favorite MaxFun hosts through some wacky ‘90s- and Spring Break-themed mini games!!

Featuring: Dave Holmes, Jeremy Bent, Oscar Montoya, Dimitry Pompée, Tom Lum, Ellen Weatherford, Alex Schmidt, Brenda Snell, Drea Clark, Alonso Duralde, Dan McCoy, Jordan Morris, Manolo Moreno, Ella Hubber, Caroline Roper, Ella McLeod, John-Luke Roberts, Justin McElroy, Clint McElroy, Mike Cabellon, Sierra Katow, Hal Lublin, Danielle Radford, John Moe, Christian Dueñas, Christian Duguay.

Timestamps:

(00:00:00) Intro
(00:02:22) Tom, Ellen, Alex, and Brenda Trivia
(00:32:47) Tom, Ellen, Manolo, and Jeremy on Party Animals
(00:46:34) Caroline, Ella, Ella, and John-Luke on British Spring Break

Host of Um Actually and nerd of many domains Ify Nwadiwe joins us as Tom helps him deconstruct the infamous Peasant Railgun from D&D. Could it actually work? And can we come up with something even more powerful using real science? We also dig into nerdery old and new, and see if Ify can convince Ella and Caroline to embrace their home country's greatest export: Warhammer.

Images we Talk About:
A Real Railgun Firing

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:06:05) The Peasant Railgun
(00:43:07) Q&A/Nerding Out
(01:12:19) Outro

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We also learn about: After this black hole research I do appreciate my family more! we’re here to game, what is a peasant? stealing science experiments for DnD campaigns, Caroline and Ella are delighted to learn the Peasant Railgun for the first time, convincing peasants to hands across america, pandering to the audience telling them their smart, My Monster Manual is On the Origin of Species, a peasant message system/computer, let people accelerate things to the speed of light! I shouldn’t let my players do WHAT, and remember kids DONT use a bong because it gets you SO HIGH, I’m reading between the lines Gary would want us to do this, the real rail gun, UM ACTUALLY ITS A PEASANT COIL GUN, rail guns are more common in fiction, the strength of a rail gun tears itself apart and creates a fireball, Ify would make each peasant in the line roll, if your players try to make the railgun say yes then show them the picture, the peasants have the means of production and destruction - they should unionize, the fastest manmade object, the manhole cover isnt the fastest object recorded, mission to touch the sun, gravity slingshot, it’s not the mass of the planet its the orbit, its not a magnet - its a magnet on a bullettrain, DMs watch out for artificer space programs, the duke of musk keeps stealing our government funding, Morgan you’re welcome to play beyblades with Ify any time, marrying bratz and digimon, England’s main export is Warhammer, can Ify convince Ella to play Warhammer, should we do a separate zoom just talking about nerd stuff? online writing forums, audio books are real books, be mean in magic, playing DnD on stage vs at home, playing true to your character.

Sources:
First Edition D&D Player's Handbook
Knight's Digest on Peasant Railgun Origins
Earliest Peasant Railgun Mention
PCGamer on D&D 2024 Dungeon Master Guide Update
IEEE Early Railgun Research
Vice "This Is Why the Navy Can’t Have Nice Railguns"
USC on Railgun Feasability
Popular Science Interview on Railgun Test
JPL Chart of Fastest Objects
CNET on Parker Solar Probe
NASA Gravity Assist Primer

Why is math both so easy and so hard for our brains, and how can the psychology of horses, babies, and mathematicians help answer that? And what wild journey did Sudoku take to become the popular puzzle that Ella adores?

Things we Talk About:
The Video of a Child Learning to Count
The Melencolia Painting

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:04:59) The Psychology of Math
(01:00:35) Sudoku
(01:44:59) Outro

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We also learn about: the Wonderful student, it’s not you - it’s math, “I did biology for a reason”, children can want a lot of complex things, it’s harder in the UK cause its Maths plural, Caroline & Ella’s math journeys, charlie solves the Riemann hypothesis, the horse the myth the legend - clever hans, clever hans was drafted into the military AS A MATHEMATICIAN, real horse math! so many animals seem to have Number Sense, counting is hard for kids, multiplication isn’t counting - it’s memorization and other strategies, Caroline doesn’t have a great Mental Blackboard, kick flipping a chair in our minds to brag to Caroline, overlapping waves, hot or not for equations, hahaha a taylor expansion?? in Lp?? ridiculous! there is no one math organ in the brain, don’t give up on math, “I don’t treat math as a monolith (I think statistics is the worst math)”, that surprises me because sudoko’s amazing and you’re wrong, the ancient mystical turtle’s magic square, a mathematical warding spell, “once something is proved true, it is eternally true”, HOW DID ELLA NOT REALIZE THIS WAS A MATH TOPIC, magic squares are unsolved, math divination, wow this is a math’s topic huh, maths in art, Melancholia, the magic square on La Sagrada Familia, wait Magic Squares AREN’T the precursor to sudoku?? I don’t know this child, if not sudoku why sudoku shaped? the Latin square originated in Korea before Euler, my parents are older than sudoku, it was originally called Number Place, even though we call it Sudoku - in Japan it’s often called Number Place for trademark reasons, the 2004 sudoku boom, sudoku is an infectious meme, this topic took so long (because Ella took sudoku breaks), figuring out the question of unique puzzles, so many ways to think about a square, advanced sudoku techniques, x-wing and swordfish, sudoku championships, of course Ella found speed running in this topic, Sudoku doesn’t seem to cure cognitive decline - but it’s also just fun to do! a beautiful sudoku poem, it’s how we learn and it’s calming - a little win, “I feel like I need to lie down”, let us know if you know the difference between 3 apples and 4 apples.

Sources:
Perfect Pitch Study
Feigenson et al. Core System of Number
The Clever Hans Phenomenon Revisited
NYTimes Berlin's Wonderful Horse
Actual Horse Number Sense Study
Number Sense in Animals
Rat Brain Number Sense Study
NPR Why Big Numbers Break our Brains
Erikson Institute Video of Child Counting
The Development of Mathematical Cognition
Math Expert Brain Activity Study
The Beauty of Math Study
University of MAryland on Math Brain Activity
Keith Devlin Stanford Talk
Katie Steckles: What Do Mathematicians Do All Day?
---
Wikipedia: Magic Square
Royal Institution: Magic Square
University of Cambridge: Magic Square
Magic Squares in Islamic Mathematics
Wiki: Sudoku
The Guardian: History of Sudoku
The Science of Sudoku by BY JEAN-PAUL DELAHAYE
Paper: There Is No 16-Clue Sudoku
Advanced Sudoku Techniques:
Wiki: World Sudoku Championships
Sudoku.com: The Fastest Sudoku Player
Sudoku.com: 4 Reasons that Sudoku is the Perfect Puzzle Game
Working Memory
BBC: Puzzle Slolving and Cognitive Decline
Sudoku 15 year study
Global Council on Brain Health Report
Sudoku Mental Fortitude